Jobs plentiful for South Dakota teens

Young are faring better than in rest of U.S.

Mar. 14, 2014

Larisa DeBoer, 19, a Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation employee, works kids with a mancala tournament last week at the Morningside Community Center in Sioux Falls. The job market for teens has recovered more quickly in South Dakota than elsewhere in the country since the recession of 2008-09. / Joe Ahlquist / Argus Leader

For the vast majority of South Dakota teens who want to participate in the tradition, summer jobs are available. The state’s unemployment rate among workers ages 16 to 19 is 10.3 percent, as tracked by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That doesn’t look great next to the 3.6 percent statewide unemployment rate for all workers or even the 6.7 percent national unemployment rate.

Nonetheless, South Dakota is sailing against a tide in which youth employment has failed to recover as quickly from the national recession as it has for older workers. In January, youth unemployment nationwide was at 14.2 percent. Many states still are above 20 percent. Overall, the teen unemployment rate has ranged from a record low of 7.8 percent in September 1956 to a high of 19.6 percent in April 2010.

In South Dakota and the states bordering it, however, the teen employment picture generally has improved in recent years. From 2011 to now, all those states have seen a notable drop in teen joblessness. In South Dakota, that rate fell from 15.6 percent to the current 10.3 percent. North Dakota saw the biggest improvement, from 15.5 percent in 2011 to 5.9 percent now.

Ralph Brown, emeritus professor of economics at the University of South Dakota, points out young workers typically are at a disadvantage in the job market. “That number is high all the time, higher than the overall unemployment rate.”

During the recession, many young workers found themselves competing with older, better-trained workers for low-wage jobs. In the Sioux Falls area now, though, so many good jobs are available for experienced workers that they are not exerting downward pressure on the entry level jobs generally filled by young workers, said Evan Nolte, executive director of the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce.

“We just have a lot of people working in this market,” he said. “Apparently, that transfers into that (teen) demographic.”

Parks employment

The Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation Department is a big employer of seasonal teen labor at pools, parks and community centers, and recreation manager Alicia Luther said the city finds itself in a competitive market for young workers.

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“We hire from 95 to 100 lifeguards every year,” she said. “They need specialized certification, and we do sometimes have a hard time finding enough lifeguards in the summer.

“Kids are going all over for jobs. We’re competing with the mall, other aquatic places, Hy-Vee, everywhere. Everybody’s in competition trying to get people to work for them,” Luther said.

As a result, many teens don’t have to settle for the state’s $7.25 hourly minimum wage. The city’s jobs, for example, start at $8.25 an hour for a playground assistant. A water safety instructor can earn $10.75.

“Our wages are typically competitive,” Luther said. “There is a really low unemployment rate and a lot of opportunity for people to find jobs at various places.”

Nolte added, “In the Sioux Falls area, that minimum wage level, in general, probably has less impact than in smaller communities in rural areas.”

Brown agreed: “I think the major impact is in small, rural areas. They have lower wages anyway.”

The $7.25 minimum wage is common nationally. But even where it is higher, there doesn’t seem to be great correlation between the minimum wage and youth employment.

Fewer job seekers

Nationwide, the number of teens seeking jobs has been on a long decline. Young workers are most heavily represented in the job market in summer. Until 1989, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the percentage of teens seeking summer jobs was close to 80 percent annually. “Since 1989, however, their July participation rate has declined,” the report notes. “The July 2013 participation rate for all 16-to-24-year-olds was 17 percentage points below the peak rate for that month in 1989.”

Youth employment tends to track the business cycle, Brown said. When times are good, it rises; during recessions, it drops. Beyond the slow recovery from the most recent recession, though, many teens who might have sought jobs in the past are instead taking summer classes, looking for internships or participating in elite sports, music and similar endeavors.

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Nolte sees it here.

“There are some outstanding examples of companies doing internships. What we’ve noticed is that has become a lot more prevalent,” he said. The work experience and contacts made in a desired field from an unpaid internship might outweigh the benefits of a low-wage job in an area where there is little opportunity for permanent employment and advancement.

Different lessons

The Current Population Survey shows that in 2009, nationwide, 53 percent of 16-to-19-year olds were enrolled in summer school. Twenty years earlier, it was 19.4 percent.

Yet some economists and labor experts worry that teens who aren’t working summer or part-time jobs are missing a chance to learn valuable lessons.

“We feel we offer a wide variety of opportunity for people who want to work,” Luther said. In many of the jobs the city offers, teens get to deal with the public, she said.

A job as a pool lifeguard might have no long-term prospects, but lifeguards learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid, and they shoulder the responsibility of safeguarding swimmers.

Luther points to her own experience working for Parks and Recreation when she was going to the University of South Dakota. It led to a career.

Multiply Luther’s example, and it speaks to why the Sioux Falls business community views the teen labor force as a valuable resource, Nolte said. Working teens have an opportunity to introduce themselves to employers.

Getting a foot in the workplace door here as a teen “gives us as a market and a community another shot at retaining that individual at some point in the future,” Nolte said.